United Airlines isn’t having a great 24 hours when it comes to its fleet. Yesterday, a United Boeing 777 lost a wheel after takeoff, and today a United Boeing 737 had its gear collapse after landing.
United Boeing 737 MAX gear collapses after landing in Houston
This incident happened today (Friday, March 8, 2024), and involves United Airlines flight UA2477, scheduled to fly from Memphis (MEM) to Houston (IAH). The flight was operated by a four-year-old Boeing 737 MAX 8 with the registration code N27290.
The 81-minute flight was routine, and touched down in Houston on runway 27 at 7:58AM, well ahead of its scheduled 8:28AM arrival. Unfortunately things then quickly took a turn for the worse. The plane exited at the very end of the runway, but somehow ended up in the grass, with the left rear gear collapsing.
As of now, the order of events isn’t totally clear — we don’t know if the plane taxied into the grass and that caused the gear collapse, or if the gear collapsed and that caused the plane to end up in the grass.
There were no injuries, and passengers and crew ended up deplaning the aircraft by stairs. When you look at United’s flight status page for this flight, it shows as having arrived 24 minutes early, though the gate is listed as “HOLD.” Hah.
The odd part of this United Boeing 737 MAX incident
Here’s what I find so interesting about this incident. Runway 27 in Houston is 10,000 feet long, so that’s a lot more runway than a 737 needs. So at first I was curious how the plane ended up in the grass at the very end of the runway. Did the pilots just touch down way too late, did they struggle to slow down, or what?
Based on air traffic control audio shared online, you can hear the United pilots requesting to “roll it all the way to the end.” That gets approved by the air traffic controller, but the United pilots are told to “keep [their] speed up.” The reason they’d presumably want to roll to the end is because it makes for a shorter taxi to their arrival gate. Meanwhile the reason the air traffic controller wanted the pilots to keep their speed up is because there’s another plane landing behind them, so you don’t want that maneuver to interfere with another landing.
One wonders what exactly went wrong there. It doesn’t sound like there was an issue right upon landing, or else the pilots wouldn’t have been voluntarily rolling it to the end. So did they keep their speed up too much and then struggle to slow down? Did they try to make the turn off the runway at too high of a speed? Or how did they end up in the grass at the end of the runway? I’m sure this will all become clear pretty soon, after an investigation is performed.
As much as the Boeing 737 MAX gets quite a bit of blame for things, I wouldn’t immediately assume that this is related to some larger problem with the jet. Let’s wait for the investigation before drawing any conclusions.
Bottom line
A United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX suffered a landing gear collapse upon arrival in Houston. Stuff like this happens, but the circumstances are unusual. The pilots requested to roll to the end of the runway (presumably for a faster taxi to the gate), but then somehow ended up in the grass at the end of the runway.
What do you make of this United 737 MAX gear collapse incident?
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